If Houston Can Find $24 Million For More Police, Maybe We Can Also Find Money For More Library Books

If I suggested Houston find some extra money to give people health insurance or buy some more books for the library, I’d be told we don’t have the money.

I’d have somebody like the depressing, imagination-stifling Annise Parker, our City Controller, tell me to be “realistic.” She’d tell me we have to focus on what we can get done. That we must be “pragmatic.”

But we sure did find money for more police.

Maybe we need more police. Fine.

We need a lot of things in Houston.

Now let’s find money for health insurance for Houston residents, more books in the library, more and better parks and better wages for city employees.

Government and politics are at core about imagination. Let’s imagine something more than just a wild west city full of cops.

The above picture is of a police car of the Devon and Cornwall Police in England. It looks like a fuel-efficient Ford Focus. Maybe HPD could ditch the use of SUV’s and use these little cars instead. That would save some money.

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A better question is why public schools cannot afford library books despite public education spending rising at a rate far faster than that of inflation the past 40 years. I wonder if the reason is that 40 years ago the role of public education was to, you know, educate the public where today the role of public education is to promote and facilitate social justice has anything to do with it.

What is also true is that public education would have a lot more support in conservative areas if the NEA wasn’t such a bunch of leftist radicals (I understand that they are not particularly leftist or radical as compared to you, but you are not the point of reference here). Do I have any problems with the existence of leftist radicals? No. Different kinds of people make the world go round. But am I going to willingly give one rusty nickel of my tax dollars to pay these radicals to indoctrinate my kids against my beliefs? No. Are there tens of millions of people who feel the same way as I do? Yes. Do these people and the politicians vote against increased public school funding for that same reason? Yes.

Bottom line: were public schools to return to the (gag!) old – fashioned ‘readin’, ‘writin’, and ‘rithmetic curriculum and the teacher’s unions cease to use their profession to impose their political views on our kids, support for public education would skyrocket. Oh yes, and your liberal Democratic politicians would win more elections because Republicans would have one less “divisive hot button issue” to use to demagogue.

Now would the result be appreciably better student performance? Hmmm … I think that is another issue for another day. Then again, show me real evidence that the left actually cares about increased student performance as opposed to increased education funding being an end itself rather than a means to better student performance or anything else (admit it, it is true, the very same folks that demand huge increases in education funding blanch at the notion of implementing quality controls at our colleges of education, some of which are REALLY BAD, and I know, I personally have had the “stereotypical” teachers that could not themselves even do the work that they were assigning us to do).